[Wine] Does Wine support the NVIDIA 7186 drivers?

[James Huk]

We need to clarify few things:

> So in answer to my query title, I assume "no, wine does not support these old cards/> drivers" wrt 3D. Fair enough for such an old card I suppose.

No, wine use OpenGL, and it works if drivers and hardware also support
certain OpenGL version and/or extensions. The problem is - the fact
that game X needs GF2 under Windows, doesn't mean that this game will
run on GF2 on Linux, this is because some D3D->OpenGL conversions just
can't be done (easily) without additional OpenGL functionality that is
available only on stronger hardware.
We need to keep in mind that, games usually degrades graphics if the
graphic card reports that it support DX7, and game can run on DX7/8/9
(Valve's Source engine is great example of this), however on windows
there can never be a situation where card support "some" functions
from DX7, and report that it support DX7 fully. With wine, we got a
problem here, because there may be situation where drivers or hardware
limit 3D support to only some functions, other functions simply won't
work, and there is no way for application to know that, because wine
will report full DX capabilities. I ran into this problem when I was
testing cards with open drivers (Voodoo3 3000 and ATI Rage 128 PRO),
although cards were capable to run certain games on Windows, they were
not able to run them on wine because of missing OpenGL functionality
(to this day I don't know if this was driver or hardware). In your
case, your game probably needs more then OpenGL on this card can
deliver...

> The motherboard is an old Asus A7V, it has an AGP Pro slot (which it claims supports such cards as Asus AGP-v6800DDR/64M). NOTE its not a 6800, its a GF-256 card). The motherboard also runs my GF2-GTS of course.
>
> What the oldest, and therefore hopefully cheapest, card thats likely to work in it, and that Wine still supports? I assume any AGP(AGP PRO slot) card should fit and basically function? but whats the oldest 3D NV drivers that wine still supports and is likely to support for the immediate future?
>
> Is this info listed somewhere?
>
> For example, should an FX5xxx range card be OK, or will it require a 6xxx range
> card - assuming I can find an AGP(pro slot) card in the first place.

FX and newer support Pixel Shaders 2.0 so yes, they will work (but FX
will work slowly - FX were known because of very slow PS-2.0 speed).
IMHO there is not much sense in buying new cards for such old PC,
graphics card is only one of many parts that PC's speed depends on:
chipset, memory type and speed, CPU type and speed, VGA Bus type and
speed, CPU-Memory interface type and speed are the others, and
unfortunately, usually adding even the most powerful card old PC can
handle, won't improve performance too much, because other parts will
be the bottleneck. Still, if you really can't spare more then few
bucks, then newer the card, the better (if I remember correctly even
GF7xxx had some AGP models..., although I don't know if they will fit
in AGP Pro slot...)

Regards.

P.S
As always - sorry for my English ;]